1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus that processes attribute information added for managing security information on an electronic document, image data and a print job, a document connecting method for the image processing apparatus, and a storage medium storing a control program for executing the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has been conventionally carried out to accumulate images scanned by a reading means of an image forming apparatus, print jobs transmitted from a print driver in a client PC connected to a network, and so forth, in a storage device, such as a hard disk drive. An image forming apparatus has been proposed which connects a plurality of documents, such as scanned image data and print jobs stored in the storage medium, into one electronic document (Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2004-185326).
Further, as a method of managing security information on electronic documents, there has been proposed a technique of setting an access right group and a password, at a time point of storing an image scanned by the reading means of the image forming apparatus, a print job input to the image forming apparatus, and so forth. According to the proposed technique, when reading out an electronic document from the storage medium for printing, it is confirmed whether the user belongs to an access right group associated with the document, and a valid password therefor is input.
By the way, electronic documents have various security levels from high to low. However, when an electronic document at a high security level and an electronic document at a low security level are merged into one electronic document, the conventional technique cannot set an appropriate security level to the resulting merged electronic document, which makes it impossible to know the security level of the electronic document.
Therefore, the merging of electronic documents makes it difficult to know which document contains important information, and there is a fear that an electronic document containing important information is erroneously transmitted.
Further, to enhance the internal control of a company, it is carried out to store a report on its financial results, a minute of its shareholder's meeting, etc., for a certain time period.
However, if such document information is converted to electronic documents and is stored in the image forming apparatus, an erroneous deletion of some or all of them can occur, and there is a risk of information leakage. In other words, to use the system for information storage with a feeling of security, it is necessary to always grasp importance of each piece of information stored in the image forming apparatus. To manually carry out an operation for grasping the importance of each electronic document, it is required to perform judgment by viewing the title and contents of the document again as required, and hence much time and labor are required, which results in a considerable management cost.